"I never felt as though he really embraced 'all of the above' anyway," Institute for Energy Research Senior Vice President Dan Kish said in an interview. "I think it was a rhetorical device, I think it polled well, and therefore they used it..."

Given their epic scale, thinning the West's combustible forests is impossible. "Ultimately many dense forests will burn," predicts Frelich. By century's end forests, like the boreal that stretches into the Arctic, will likely be savannah.